Matthew GlowickiLouisville Courier Journal
Tony Guanci remembers first touring the historic Louisville Gardens space years ago. The space itself was memorable, as was the cut he got on his leg from a nail while walking through the armory-turned-entertainment venue.
The entrepreneur jokes that the "TG" lettering on the front of the building stands for his name. But he knows the storied downtown building belongs to no one person and holds a special place in the memories of many.
"I am very aware of how important this building is," he said. "If you ask anybody about The Gardens, everybody has a story. It’s a high school graduation, or I saw Elvis or I saw whoever … And I feel an obligation to do something really important and do it right.”
Guanci, along with Scott Hodgkins, is working on a plan to revive the 1905 space with an anticipated minimum investment of $60 million.
Their proposal to redevelop the venue into film and television production space made a splash in December 2022 at a news conference.
Background: Long-vacant Louisville Gardens is getting new life at last. Here's the plan
Since then, the site hasn’t made much progress. That’s about to change, with environmental remediation work scheduled to start in early June.
“You may not be seen any physical work being done, but there is work,” Guanci said. “We're peeling back the onion.”
How developers are exploring the Louisville Gardens
Part of envisioning what can be is getting a better understanding of original structural plans.
The nearly 120-year-old building has a number of past lives, from its time as the Jefferson County Armory to a 6,000-seat venue that saw the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. to Harry S. Truman and a performance by Elvis Presley.
"In order for us to come in and really understand what we can do, we need to go back and find out what really exists," Guanci said. "We've got a number of engineers and architects and general contractors that are collecting (data), looking at it, and then we have to decide how do we take what we know exists, and can we build what we hope we can build inside it?"
Plans call for the conversion of the arena, at Muhammad Ali Boulevard and Fifth Street, into a hub with sound stages for film, music and digital production totaling 40,000 square feet of production space.
Feasibility work includes exploring the building's foundation, floor, sub-floor and other structural elements.
Louisville Metro Government owns the property and signed a letter of intent with River City Entertainment Group LLC, of which Guanci and Hodgkins are principals, in December 2022.
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The letter gives the developers until early June 2023 to conduct the work it needs to flesh out the structural and financial details of its plan, leading to the signing of a formal development agreement, though this period can be extended.
Caitlin Bowling, spokeswoman for the city’s economic development cabinet, told The Courier Journal the developers are seeking an extension.
Meanwhile, work is expected to begin June 5 to clean up lead dust, asbestos and suspected lead-based paint at the site, Bowling said.
The nearly $1.4 million effort by California-based Tetra Tech Inc. will be paid by the city through the Brownfield Cleanup Revolving Loan Fund. Tetra Tech previously performed environmental assessments on the building and did remediation work at the venue in 2018 focused on contaminants in hydraulic systems.
There’s a larger studio project underway in Southern California
As planning continues on the Louisville project, Guanci is far into development on a different studio project in Southern California.
Sylmar Studios, a $500 million, 300,000-square-foot film and television production facility, is being built in the city of Sylmar, a northern neighborhood of Los Angeles about 20 miles northwest of Hollywood.
Guanci said the project includes about 16 sound stages, office space, a backlot, and mills for sets, props and other creations.
Construction began in 2022 at the studio, the first phase of which is expected to open in early 2024.
Film production facilities are a newer venture for Guanci, a veteran of the real estate, music and sporting industries. While he's a California resident, his cell phone still has a Las Vegas area code from his more than 20 years working as a partner with the Maloof family, which at one time owned the Palms casino and the Sacramento Kings.
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How the California and Louisville studios will differ
While the two projects share the same function, Louisville’s proposed production hub would be a smaller operation than the Sylmar development.
In California, there will be 120,000 square feet of production office space while Louisville’s project would have 40,000. Sixteen stages are planned for Sylmar. Four are envisioned for Louisville.
Sylmar stages would receive four times the amperage than Louisville’s.
“That's mainly because the sets, the lighting, the level that they would need to shoot something in Louisville would be totally different than something that, you know, Steven Spielberg wants to shoot and you want at your stages in California,” Guanci said.
While the California stages would have catwalks and lifts and be outfitted to host large television show audiences, anticipated different needs for Louisville would inform what is built here.
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Green screens, for example, are commonplace in Los Angeles and won’t be a part of Sylmar, Guanci said, while they would be in Louisville.
He said he can see Louisville’s studios being utilized for commercial shoots, television films and any number of possibilities from local creators.
A unique part of the Louisville plan: a training facility in Louisville for production careers on the block to the west of the Louisville Gardens, with the goal of strengthening the pipeline of local talent.
“If we can adaptively come up with something that not only gives the city this building back but brings the state and the city a new industry, a new set of jobs, a new workforce, I think it's a win-win,” Guanci said. “And I think the community will see that and know that we're not carpetbaggers from California or from wherever, you know, that we have a real a real love and passion to make this work for Louisville.”
Business reporter Matthew Glowicki can be reached at mglowicki@courier-journal.com, 502-582-4000or on Twitter @mattglo.
